Jean-François Pirson. Pédagogies de l’espace - Workshops

The architecture cell of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation is launching a new ‘Fenêtre sur’ collection dedicated to disciplines related to architecture.

An artist and teacher, honorary professor at the Higher Institute of Architecture Lambert Lombard (Liege), Jean François Pirson expresses his relationship with space through an array of artistic and educational practices: drawings, photography, installations, texts, walks and workshops.

Focusing on space, his teaching work explores phenomenological, anthropological and artistic fields. It addresses in particular the space of the body, how we inhabit a space, “outside” spaces, perception and the creative attitude. He has a predilection for working at the crossroads of disciplines, practices and philosophies.

The publication includes:

- 4 texts written by critics and first-hand witnesses of his teaching activity;

- a selection of courses and workshops given both in Belgium and abroad;

- hitherto unpublished texts and illustrations by Jean-François Pirson.

Presentation by Denis Gielen, Director of the new Collection "Fenêtre sur" dedicated to the disciplines related to architecture:

"Opening a collection dedicated to disciplines that are in dialogue with architecture, together with Jean-François Pirson, an architect by training and a teacher concerned with stimulating personal approaches to space, provides an ideal opportunity to broaden its practical and theoretical scope. Because he does not consider architecture as an autarky, but likes to see it nourished by what could, at first glance, be considered foreign or even contrary to it (the formless, the void, the vernacular, the spontaneous, the natural, the precarious, etc.), Jean-François Pirson questions – at the frontiers of what he considers thinkable today and what Michel Foucault would call “the orders of discourse” of architecture – the platitudes and false assumptions that provide fallow ground for conformist residential construction and town and country planning. After more than thirty years of teaching, interweaving concepts of space, body, movement, societies, objects, pathways, etc., what he has distilled as empirical knowledge in his books, conferences and workshops is simply the freedom – or the need? – to review the elementary principles of architecture, to convey to us a definition that is as inclusive as possible: giving forms to space in response to the concern – or need? or desire? – to inhabit it…. Through his readings and his travels, in the course of a multitude of encounters and exchanges along a path that combines aesthetics and anthropology, sculpture and architecture, writing and iconography, this artist and teacher in constant evolution has consistently sought the origins behind the forms: forces and structures that underlie their aspects and programme their appearances. Through an educational approach that is so un-academic that it has become not so much a teaching of art but the art of teaching, Jean-François Pirson has generated a body of work that is as appealing as it is demanding, whose significance – taken from his attentiveness to the other and what he does – can be compared to the relational aesthetics that have recently made inroads in the field of the visual arts."

Contact : Lamya Ben Dajffar